Health Care

Information Reduction 3: Information is Selection

Information reduction is everywhere In a previous post, I described how the coding of medical facts – a process that leads from a real-world situation to a flat rate per case (DRG) – involves a dramatic reduction in the amount of information: Information reduction This information reduction is a very general phenomenon and by no means limited to information and its coding in the field of medicine. Whenever we notice something, our sensory organs – for example our retinas – reduce the amount of information we take in. Our brain then simplifies the data further so that only the essence

By Hans Rudolf Straub|2025-11-15T13:25:53+00:0011. June 2019|Categories: Information, Information Reduction|Tags: Health Care, Information Reduction, Information Selection, Information Theory, Medicine|0 Comments

Information Reduction 2: The Funnel

The funnel of information reduction In my previous article Information reduction 1, I described a chain of information processing from the patient to the flat rate per case (DRG): This acts as a funnel, reducing the amount of information available at each step. The extent of the reduction is dramatic. Imagine we have the patient in front of us. One aspect of a comprehensive description of this patient is their red blood cells. There are 24-30 trillion (= 24–30·1012 ) red blood cells in the human body, each with a particular shape and location in the body, and each moving in

By Hans Rudolf Straub|2025-11-15T13:26:57+00:0011. June 2019|Categories: Information, Entropy, Information Reduction, Micro / Macro|Tags: funnel, Health Care, ICD-10, Information Reduction|0 Comments

Information Reduction 1: Coding

Two types of coding In a previous post, I described two fundamentally different types of coding. In the first, the intention is to carry all the information contained in the source over into the encoded version. In the second, on the other hand, we deliberately refrain from doing this. It is the second – the information-losing – type that is of particular interest to us. When I highlighted this difference in my presentations twenty years ago and the phrase ‘information reduction’ appeared prominently in my slides, my project partners pointed out that this might not go down too well with